Interview with the Fictionist of The Witch of Pontevedra
By Ysabel San Pedro Schuld
Cymbeline R Villamin signed a three-year traditional publishing contract with 8Letters Bookstore and Publishing last 3 December 2025 for The Witch of Pontevedra, a speculative romance-political metaphor.
Cymbeline and I were classmates in a creative writing class at the Ateneo de Manila University graduate school way back in the late ‘80s. We also worked together at the Department of Science and Technology where I worked for a year. We stayed friends and writing comrades through all these years. It is a joy and an honor to be talking with Cymbeline now about her new novella, which is released in 2026.
Ysabel San Pedro Schuld (YSS): First of all, Congratulations on your publishing contract with 8Letters. How did this partnership come about?
Cymbeline R Villamin (CRV): Thank you. This is my third book with 8Letters. We have a shared vision. [The publisher] Cindy Wong champions stories that resist the ordinary, works that take emotional risks and open new imaginative doors. She responded not only to the narrative, but to its emotional temperature, its sense of interior danger, and its longing to break out of predictable molds. That kind of recognition is rare, and I knew instantly that this is the home for my work.
YSS: Your works often explore sensuality and emotional intensity. What draws you to this landscape?
CRV: Sensuality is one of the oldest human languages. Before politics and social scripts, before roles and rules, there is the body, with its yearning, its memory, its hunger to connect. I write from that place because it is honest. It refuses to pretend. And love, as a force, is never polite: it’s destabilizing, awakening, inconvenient, sometimes taboo, sometimes redemptive. I’m interested in what happens when characters face the truth of their desire and allow it to alter the narrative of who they think they are.
YSS: What inspired you to write about this novella about the Manananggal?
CRV: There was a call for submission last year from UP Visayas, if I remember right, of stories about the region. The Aswang lore came immediately to mind. I recalled a poem about the Manananggal, as being fragmented metaphorically, being a victim of violence. At about that time also, I was reading a psychological novel, A Certain Hunger, in which the protagonist murders men and eats them. Plus, SpeciFic seemed to be the trend. All these came into play. I was moved to write about a witch. I gave the story, but the better writers were chosen. I am thankful though because I was able to expand it into a novella.
YSS: Do you strongly identify with the anti-heroine?
CRV: Lyra Saavedra is a fusion of many personalities I knew. But for consistency, and coherence, I use myself as template for the character. I do not consciously allow myself to identify with any of my fictional characters. They are always outside of me. This is my discipline to keep aesthetic distance.
YSS: What hook can you describe this novella for prospective readers?
CRV: This is not your regular erotic novella. With every intimacy is an undercurrent of philosophy. Why do we love and how? Who do we become in the presence of someone we desire? How do we reconstruct our broken heart when it ruptures? How is it like to die in the 28th century, the era of post humans and ghost codes? This is a futuristic narrative with a backstory in the 17th century.
YSS: What target audience would benefit most in reading this novella, and why?
CRV: The millennials would benefit most. This novella is a political metaphor. It is a huge ghost code that preserves historical memories of colonial violence, political corruption, and fascism, which institutional archives are trying to erase from racial consciousness. I am authoring a paper on this that says, Literature is a technological tool for preserving truths that helps place history in perspective. I will send it to the Philippine Journal of Science, a scholarly publication of the National Research Council of the Philippines, where I am a regular member of Division XI (Humanities).
YSS: Do you consider the witches of Pontevedra strong contenders of feminist literature in the Philippines?
CRV: Definitely. Vina and Lyra are the conflicted selves of our mother country, the Philippines. She was a victim of violence in the colonial past, until the eras of the Marcos dictatorship and Duterte tokhang; up to now, when her people are drowned during typhoons because of flood control corruption. This is a kind of violence too, a painful death in the hands of the betrayers of public trust. I want our youth to know and remember there was once an Archimedes Trajano. Until now, there are still numerous Archimedes Trajanos, sacrificial youths, victims of injustice. Yet we continue to be blind and incapable of righteous anger. But soon the witches in us will engage in an Armageddon of consciousness. Thoughts have energy and power.
YSS: Do you believe this novel is a good resource for inclusion under the subjects of Contemporary Philippine Literature and World Literature for both undergrad and postgrad scholars and students?
CRV: I believe it would be good if this novella is included in the canon of Philippine literature studies as an example of blended genres—speculative romance, myth, and science fiction. It is futuristic yet has a backstory of the past. It introduces the futuristic concepts of post humans and ghost codes.
YSS: Can you give us a birds-eye-view of your three main characters?
CRV: The character of Vina is the title role. She is the hero who is conflicted but transcended in the end. She is the "saint."
Lyra is the contra vida, "seducing" Vina's fiancé, but she has brought redemption to all three of them. She is the "prophet."
Noah is a neutral and yet also ambivalent character. Infidel yet true. Lover of women yet has homosexual tendency. At one point he is drawn to his associate, Jake.
All of them are standout characters because of their ambivalence and authenticity as humans.
YSS: Do you think this book can expand readers understanding about love and relationships?
CRV: Yes, I believe this novella will expand the readers' understanding of love and relationships. Endings can be sad, yet one would rather walk away from a sad experience with wisdom and new-found strength.
YSS: What make this work iconoclastic?
CRV: This work is iconoclastic namely:
• It seeks not to demonize brujeria but present it as an expression of brokenness and feminine power.
• It carries the message that leaving a dysfunctional marriage can be liberating and beneficial for both spouses.
• It shatters the conception that women rivals need not be toxic enemies but must seek a common ground to form alliance of sisterhood.
• It opens a new mindset that finding another person to love is not cheating when the one seeking to break from the relationship is honest about it.
• It implies that loving another does not diminish the lover's integrity. One must let go when the fire has died. Not treat a spouse or lover as personal property or a slave forever chained.
• It shows when one is devastated by love, humans must learn to heal and move on, not hurt the ex or the third party.
• It gives the message that God is the greatest, faithful Lover.
YSS: What lingering message would remain in the readers of this novella?
CRV: What Lyra told Noah, “We cannot heal ourselves when others are hurting.”
YSS: What do you hope readers will experience when they read this novella?
CRV: I hope they feel both held and challenged. I want readers to sense the beauty in longing, the ache in love, the thrill of emotional risk. And, in the quiet spaces between scenes, they might see themselves reflected, their own unspoken desires, their own private myths, their own transformations. If the book gives someone permission to feel more deeply, or to understand their heart more clearly, then it has done its work.
YSS: Are there specific literary influences behind this book?
CRV: I gravitate toward writers who blur boundaries: Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Duras, Banana Yoshimoto, James Salter, and even the lyricism of Milan Kundera. From Filipino writers, I admire how Gina Apostol, Ninotchka Rosca, Merlinda Bobis, and Joi Barrios push emotional and linguistic texture. I read widely: philosophy, speculative fiction, poetry, neuroscience, folklore. All these shapes the atmosphere of the story, not as direct references, but as emotional resonances.
YSS: Many consider 8Letters a leading curator of emerging Filipino voices. What was it like working with Cindy Wong and her team?
CRV: Professional, imaginative, and deeply collaborative. Cindy brings an artist’s eye to the editorial process, not just looking at the words, but at the emotional temperature behind the words. She respects the writer’s identity while guiding the manuscript toward its strongest self. 8Letters treats each book as a creative ecosystem, not just a product. That philosophy is rare and valuable
YSS: Your readers know you’re also working on a diptych novella, Lovers Between Worlds and a sequel to The Witch of Pontevedra which is The Witches Weep. How does your current novella connect to your larger body of work?
CRV: All my stories converse secretly with each other. They revolve around relationships pushed to their emotional thresholds, where love becomes a portal, memory becomes myth, and the ordinary becomes uncanny. This novella is part of that continuum: another facet of the same gemstone. It examines how intimacy can fracture time, how longing becomes a compass, and how women reclaim their narratives in both quiet and incendiary ways.
YSS: What can readers expect next from you?
CRV: I am also working on the English translation of Ang Maghuhurno. Each project explores a different corner of the emotional and imaginative map, but all are carried by the same belief that love is never a single-note phenomenon. There are always layers. Always shadows. Always light.
YSS: What does this milestone mean to you personally?
CRV: It feels like a luminous affirmation, that stories shaped by complexity, sensuality, and quiet defiance have a home in contemporary Filipino literature. Signing with 8Letters is more than a professional achievement; it is a recognition of a lifelong devotion to the written word. It reminds me that literature is a living, breathing practice, and that every book is a love letter to the self I used to be and the writer I am becoming.
At 70, I pray for creative energy to finish my diptych novel. My late father used to tell me the women in our clan had long lives, and he said I am no exception. But it is good to be always prepared for the final journey.”
*****
Cymbeline Villamin is a fictionist whose work explores transgressive desire as a site of knowledge, reckoning, and redemption. Her narrative moves through erotic thresholds, between body and faith, memory and futurity, myth and technology rendered in a layered style that invites multiple readings. Love in her work is never ornamental: it is dangerous, insurgent, and revealing.
She is the author of The Witch of Pontevedra, Ang Maghuhurno, and Lovers in Kyoto, all published by 8Letters Bookstore & Publishing. Across these works, Villamin interrogates intimacy as a moral and metaphysical event, where eros becomes a force that disrupts patriarchal order, exposes historical violence, and gestures toward grace. Her stories are often erotic not for shock, but for truth, where the body speaks what culture represses, and pleasure becomes a form of knowing.
Villamin is a graduate of A.B. Literature from Far Eastern University and was a fellow of the University of the Philippines - National Writing Workshop in 1976. She studied Creative Writing at Ateneo de Manila University, where her essay, “Writing as an Adventure,” was published in Philippine Studies (2005). She has contributed fiction and essays to various literary and cultural publications in the Philippines.
Her work insists that eros and intellect are not opposites but collaborators, and that the erotic imagination, when written with rigor and lyric depth, can be a redemptive power.
Ysabel San Pedro Schuld aka Ysabel San Pedro aka Ysabel San Pedro McDonald was born and raised in the Philippines. In 2025 she released a collection of poems entitled, The Door Opens…
She worked as a freelance journalist and correspondent with Philippine Daily Inquirer from 2006 to 2008 and the Hongkong based Asia Technology magazine from 1989 to 1990; and as senior researcher and writer for Anzor Public Relations in the 1990s. She has contributed to various journals like Saipan based Umanidat Journal, Philippines’ Caracao Journal; Quill Books; Wayfarer Magazine; The National Library of Poetry; The Asian Reporter; What’s on in Manila Magazine; The American Poetry Association; Department of Science and Technology Science Technology Information Institute Journal and FOR aka Friends of Repertory newsletter among others.
She also has worn many hats as an economic development researcher, executive secretary, high school and ESL teacher at Commonwealth of Northern Marianas Islands as well as a home equity and account resolution specialist in a bank where she worked for 23 years, among others. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she has worked as a medical Tagalog interpreter for the past 11 years.
Thank you so much Ysabel!
ReplyDelete